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Paley had put the argument in an apparently unanswerable
form. If you found a watch, full of mechanism
exquisitely adapted to produce a series of operations
all leading to the fulfilment of one central purpose
of measuring for mankind the march of the day and
night, could you believe that it was not the work
of a cunning artificer who had designed and contrived
it all to that end? And here was a far more wonderful
thing than a watch, a man with all his organs ingeniously
contrived, cords and levers, girders and kingposts,
circulating systems of pipes and valves, dialysing
membranes, chemical retorts, carburettors, ventilators,
inlets and outlets, telephone transmitters in his
ears, light recorders and lenses in his eye:
was it conceivable that this was the work of chance?
that no artificer had wrought here? that there was
no purpose in this, no design, no guiding intelligence?
The thing was incredible. In vain did Helmholtz
declare that ’the eye has every possible defect
that can be found in an optical instrument, and even
some peculiar to itself,’ and that ’if
an optician tried to sell me an instrument which had
all these defects I should think myself quite justified
in blaming his carelessness in the strongest terms,
and sending him back his instrument.’ To
discredit the optician’s skill was not to get
rid of the optician. The eye might not be so
cleverly made as Paley thought, but it was made somehow,
by somebody.

And then my argument with Father Addis began all over
again. It was easy enough to say that every man
makes his own eyes: indeed the embryologists
had actually caught him doing it. But what about
the very evident purpose that prompted him to do it?
Why did he want to see, if not to extend his consciousness
and his knowledge and his power? That purpose
was at work everywhere, and must be something bigger
than the individual eye-making man. Only the
stupidest muckrakers could fail to see this, and even
to know it as part of their own consciousness.
Yet to admit it seemed to involve letting the bogey
come back, so inextricably had we managed to mix up
belief in the bogey’s existence with belief in
the existence of design in the universe.

THE IRRESISTIBLE CRY OF ORDER, ORDER!

Our scornful young scientific and philosophic lions
of today must not blame the Church of England for
this confusion of thought. In 1562 the Church,
in convocation in London ’for the avoiding of
diversities of opinions and for the establishment
of consent touching true religion,’ proclaimed
in their first utterance, and as an Article of Religion,
that God is ‘without body, parts, or passions,’
or, as we say, an Elan Vital or Life Force.
Unfortunately neither parents, parsons, nor pedagogues
could be induced to adopt that article. St John
might say that ‘God is spirit’ as pointedly
as he pleased; our Sovereign Lady Elizabeth might
ratify the Article again and again; serious divines